When weaning a young infant onto solid foods, it is common practice to feed that young infant with puréed foods. Such puréed foods can be purchased ready made in jars or cartons, but this is often an expensive option. Many carers therefore prefer to prepare their own puréed foods at home. Such preparation typically involves preparation of a suitable foodstuff in bulk, which is then puréed and separated out into separate food portions (e.g. sized to provide a single meal serving for the infant). It is convenient for the carer to store such separate food portions in the freezer, and the carer therefore has an ongoing need to identify a suitable storage container to use for this purpose.
Ice cube trays having plural separate cavities are well-known in the prior art, and these are often used by the carer for such purpose. Standard ice cube trays are however, not ideal because they typically have no lid and the foodstuff is therefore potentially open to contamination, and also because it is notoriously difficult to remove individual cubes from the tray. Such difficulty can be compounded for the carer who needs ready access to individual cubes of the frozen foodstuff to enable ready preparation of a meal for a hungry and often crying infant.
An alternative approach would be for the carer to simply store each individual portion in a separate lidded food container. The disadvantage of this approach is that the home freezer rapidly becomes cluttered with many separate food containers. Finding the right food container at the infant's mealtime can therefore become a frustrating task.
The present invention provides advantages over each of the above approaches by providing a lidded food container that is arranged to receive a food portion, wherein the body of that container is provided with one or more connectors, and each connector is arranged for ready reversible connection to a mating connector provided to the body of a second similar (e.g. identical) food container. Thus, in a typical use scenario plural such food containers would separately be filled with a food portion. The separate containers would then be connected up to form an assembly of food containers, each separately-lidded and each containing a separate portion of food. This assembly would then be placed in the freezer for convenient, uncluttered frozen storage thereof. At mealtime, the carer would then remove the assembly from the freezer and disconnect a single food container from the assembly for use at that mealtime. The assembly is then placed back in the freezer.
In a development of the present invention, each food container is arranged to be amenable to microwave cooking. Thus, in a further step in the above typical use scenario the carer would place the separated off food container in the microwave for microwave warming up of the individual food portion contained therein. This again is advantageous over the use of standard ice cube trays in that when such trays are employed the removed frozen cube of puréed food must be transferred to another container (e.g. plate or bowl) for microwave warming thereof.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a food container that is suitable for use in frozen storage of infant foodstuffs.
It is a supplementary object of the present invention to provide a food container that is suitable for use in microwave warming up of frozen infant foodstuffs.